An increasing number of automobile repair shops are declining the business of plugging/patching automobile tires, opting for the more profitable choice of total tire replacement, even when the tires are repairable. This trend is directly responsible for the creation of several dilemmas affecting our economy and environment today. Worth noting is the forcing of the public to unnecessarily spend millions and millions of their dollars that could go towards other much needed purchases for the household rather than to the very expensive cost (by comparison) of premature replacement of their tires. It is further noted that a large portion of those discarded tires end up in landfills, resulting in a serious health threat to the environment due to the exposure of the tires to the elements. These tires hold water, the main breeding grounds for mosquitoes that carry potentially deadly diseases. Tire piles can be set on fire through arson or accident; these fires are hard to extinguish, and produce dark heavy thick smoke and toxic run-off into the waterways. Tire piles also harbor other vermin such as deadly disease carrying rats and snakes. These are all valid health concerns that are associated with the current and increasing number of landfills being built today.
Another dilemma is the use of punctured tire repair sealants which come with a host of explosive, life threatening, cancer causing, ozone depleting effects that the public is being forced to purchase and use as an easy alternative to the total tire replacement that would otherwise be necessary because of the refusal of repair shops to repair the tires, as well as the extreme difficulty involved with the attempted usage of the do-it-yourself puncture tire repair kits currently on the market.
Because the patching of a tire historically has only taken place in some form of an automobile repair shop utilizing large machinery, the only other current option available to the vehicle owner/driver is to purchase an inexpensive puncture tire repair kit similar to the one shown in FIGS. 9A and 9B, then singularly plug the punctured tire; however, the currently sold tire repair kits are physically challenging to the user since the user must have strong hand and upper body strength in order to use the current tire repair kits like the one displayed in FIGS. 9A and 9B. Each of the tools in the current tire repair kits like the one displayed in FIGS. 9A and 9B include a handle 78 that has predetermined finger positions 78A for four fingers, therefore placing the pole support 78B (usually of a ½″ diameter or more) directly in between the middle and ring fingers of the user, causing great discomfort to the hand when in use, a painful sensation best described as having your hand squeezed while you're wearing a ½″ thick ring on your middle or ring finger, as the device is clenched tightly by the user in order to make the device usable.
Great physical strength is further needed in order to jack/lift the car and tire/wheel off the ground surface, in addition to undoing and remove the lug nuts, to lift and remove the tire(s) off of the vehicle especially if the hole is in a rear tire (an area typically tight and very difficult to maneuver in). Then, the user will have to fit the eye 78E of the devices pole 78PO with the equipped plug 78PL; note that when the plug 78PL is combined with the pole 78PO, it increases the outside diameter of the repair portion of the device when inserting the device FIG. 9B in the direction of 78D in upwards of 500% and more from the actual size of the punctured hole in the tire itself. Inserting the devices pole 78PO with the equipped plug 78PL tends to be a very difficult task to accomplish, because attempting to force a much larger diameter consisting of a very sticky tire plug into a very small diametric punctured hole in a tire will require an enormous amount of hand and upper-body strength to perform this task. It is at this juncture that the chances increase that the user will over-force the pole portion 78PO along with the plug 78PL deeply into the inner tire area to the point that the plug is totally inside of the tire, so that when the user then pulls outward as to remove the tool FIG. 9B from the tire, the plug will detach from the said tool and free-fall into the tire, possibly causing a problem to those wheels equipped with a tire pressure monitoring system (TPMS). This task of self plugging punctured tires is so difficult that users tend to either unsafely delay the self repair by just adding air to the tire for months at a time until the tire is worn beyond any type of repair, unfortunately putting themselves and the public at risk of injury or even death due to driving on either under/over inflated tires; or until they can afford total replacement of the damaged tire. In a desperate attempt the owner/driver has even been known to “file-out” the hole by using the current kit-equipped file 78F shown in FIG. 9A as the only way to alleviate some of the physical stresses the user is sure to endure by making the hole larger for the insertion of the plug; only to find that they erroneously made the hole larger. This error causes more failures of the seal to re-leak due to the “file-out” hole being made too large, a total contradiction to the task since the logical idea would be to keep the hole original as possible whenever a patching or plugging of a tire was to take place. Then after all of that, the user must safely re-outfit the vehicle with the just plugged tire.
With the tire repair kit shown in FIGS. 9A and 9B, it is generally recommended by the manufacturer to leave a small portion of the end of the plug outside the tire exposed. Another negative aspect of the current tire repair kit is the “snagging” of the plug that takes place when the recommended exterior exposed end of the plug that is in the tire comes in contact with the road during the slightest event of tire spin-out, prone to happen on wet slippery surfaces or when quick accelerations are taking place. The chances of snagging are even more likely to take place if the exposed end of the plug is located at the outer-most largest diameter of the tires tread versus the smallest diameter which is located down in the valley of the treaded area of the tire where the exposed end could still be snagged if the tire should run over debris covered road surfaces, especially on/off ramps or highway shoulders.